Space-age `Cowboys And Indians`

Remember when you were kids and ran around the house pretending to shoot it out with each other? For grown-ups who still haven`t outgrown the urge, the game has entered a new dimension - Photon.

The first of 70 futuristic participation centers recently opened in Kenilworth, N.J., the brainchild of 40-year-old George Carter, a Dallas entrepreneur with a mechanical engineering background. Three more will be in operation before year`s end.

If your yen for intergalactic warfare goes beyond the movie screen or video-game tube, strap on a powerpack, vest and helmet, wrap your trigger finger around a photon pistol, and prepare for battle.

The battlefield is a room roughly the size of a basketball court, a darkened maze of catacombs and catwalks veiled in mist and pierced by laser- like beams of colored light. Two teams of up to 10 players attempt to shoot their way to the alien base station, blasting as many of the enemy as possible in the process.

To become a competent player takes a few tours of the battlefield. To become a skillful warrior takes many more. At $3.50 per game, and $6.50 for a permanent ID card, it`s not a sport for the indigent.

Players can squeeze off a shot (or photon, a particle of light) every 1.5 seconds. Each hit on an enemy helmet is worth 10 points, and three consecutive hits on the base station is good for 200. Each time the enemy zaps you, though, you lose 10 points and the power in your photon gun for five seconds.

Each shot produces a fantastic sound effect in the helmets` speakers, and a computer chip in the vest tabulates scores, which are revealed on a monitor at the conclusion of the 6 1/2-minute war.

In a demonstration session at his $1 million gameroom, Carter first pitted teams of reporters against each other, and scores were fairly even. Then he put a team of novices in with his crack troops - players with nearly 1,000- game experience acquired in a prototype facility at Dallas. The result made Little Big Horn seem like a close contest.

``Everybody thought I was crazy, but I`ve always been involved in unique projects,`` Carter said. ``There`s always a new sensation just around the corner, and we think this is the next one. We`re targeted to a yuppie market, but we think we`ll have a broad base of appeal.``

Carter envisions future centers where Photon and other similar games, perhaps involving holographics (three-dimensional projected images) are played by leagues of teams. In the next year, he plans a Photon tournament with a big cash prize.